Assistant Professor of Psychiatry and Human Genetics and Director of the Laboratory

Neurobehavioral Disorders

Education

MD

The following is taken from "emedicine® from WebMD: Bipolar Affective Disorder" and was written by Stephen Soreff, MD, President of Education Initiatives, Nottingham, NH; Faculty, Metropolitan College of Boston University, Boston, MA, and Lynne Alison McInnes, MD, Associate Adjunct Professor of Psychiatry and Genetics and Genomic Sciences, Department of Psychiatry and Human Genetics, Mount Sinai School of Medicine:

"So many different mental disorders," Dr. Alison McInnes said Tuesday as she led a jury through the branches of men and women, the flashes of color, that yielded the man convicted last week of murdering three tourists in February 1999.

McInnes, an assistant professor of psychiatry and human genetics at the Mount Sinai School of Medicine in New York, pointed to Stayner's gene pool and environment.

She pointed to experts who say Stayner suffers from mental disorders ranging from pedophilia to compulsive hair-pulling to obsessive and intrusive thoughts.

And she concluded that Stayner met the legal criteria for insanity when he committed those murders three years ago.

As Stayner's trial entered its eighth week, the defense team leaned heavily on McInnes in its effort to remove the possibility of the death penalty by proving that Stayner was insane in 1999.

...

Williamson on Tuesday painted McInnes as a novice, testifying in her first sanity murder trial, who bucks the sanity opinion of other experts in the Stayner case, who failed to tape-record her interviews with Stayner, who misinterpreted his decades-long interest in young girls and who might have disregarded American Psychiatric Association guidelines by offering a bottom-line opinion on his sanity.

...

Williamson's cross-examination of McInnes continues today.

Under questioning by defense attorney Marcia Morrissey, McInnes described Stayner as a complex brew of mental disorders who was gripped by psychosis and other symptoms when he killed.And that was the culmination of his genetics, the environment that shaped him and his own mental illness.

Stayner's family tree, McInnes said, features relatives who died in institutions.Who meted out or were the victims of sexual abuse.Who tried, sometimes successfully, to commit suicide.And who increased the problem gene pool by choosing spouses with similar problems.

Stayner, too, was shaped by his environment, McInnes said.The kidnapping of his brother, Steven, when he, too, was just a boy.Molestation by an uncle who showed young Cary pictures of nude young girls that he could never erase from his mind.The return of Steven after seven years of sexual abuse.Steven's death in a motorcycle accident.The murder of a favorite uncle.A suicide attempt.

Those incidents and more fueled Stayner's mental illness and his break with reality in 1999, she said.

He thought the world was ending, that he was receiving messages from television and others commanding him to "do something that he didn't want to do," McInnes said.And he saw dotted lines on the necks of people around him, shortly before he strangled Sund and Silvina and cut Juli's throat.

Then, McInnes said, he could no longer distinguish right from wrong or comprehend his actions -- the legal test for insanity.

Evidence in the sanity phase of the trial is expected to conclude this week.

If Stayner is determined to be sane, the jury will then decide between life in prison or the death penalty in the next phase of trial.

In addition to Dr. Cohen, other NAAR-funded researchers presenting at the symposium include Allison McInnes, M.D., of the Department of Psychiatry and Human Genetics at Mount Sinai; Helen Tager-Flusberg, Ph.D., of the Department of Anatomy and Neurobiology at Boston University School of Medicine; and Rebecca Landa, Ph.D., director of the Center for Autism and Related Disorders at Kennedy Krieger Institute.